COVAL

An app that replaces in person grocery store lines with a virtual queue and allow you to schedule your future shopping trips from the comfort of your home.

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Inspiration

One of the most universal, but universally scorned things we do is...waiting in lines. Especially these days with the threat of COVID-19, waiting too close to others for essential services like grocery stores can have a negative impact on health. With social distancing being hard to enforce in lines (increasing the risk of community spread of COVID), customer frustration, and employees feeling overwhelmed, it is no wonder that now more than ever, the time people spend waiting in lines and how they do so is a big deal. Despite this, 9/10 people still prefer to shop in store and 3X as more people continue to shop in stores compared to online. Our team has heard from the people and have listened, bringing you the solution. Hint: its below

What it does

COVAL is a mobile application that replaces in person lines with a virtual queue and allows customers to schedule future shopping trips. You read that right! Let's get more into the nitty gritty. Not only will our app allow you to check how busy stores are before you leave your home but you can join a virtual queue from the comfort of your home, your car, or anywhere else. What's more, COVAL allows you to reserve times for future shopping trips, helping you create that seamless schedule you always wished for and getting you in and out of stores quickly. If your chosen store is too busy, COVAL will automatically suggest other stores in your area, to help you save time and protect your health.

How we built it

We are developing the backend of our app in Firebase and have been using react native as our framework for app development. We plan to integrate the 'google maps popular times API' to provide an indication of how busy stores are (https://github.com/m-wrzr/populartimes). Lastly, we will be integrating a QR code so that users can verify that they are in their chosen store, in addition to using location services.

The first step to building any app is to plan the app and its features and draw out a wireframe to visualize the vision. Next, we had to bring that vision to life by prototyping the app on Figma. We began by making the customer account of the app and animated it so that we could have a working prototype for our dev team to see. We also then had to make the account for the grocery stores as their User Experience will be different and have different features than the customer.

Challenges we ran into

A major challenge we ran into was learning about and getting accustomed to react native. This involved reading up on react java script. However, with the help of online resources and some expert programming friends, we have been ironing out the kinks!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A couple weeks ago, we were surprised to hear we were finalists for the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Design Challenge for our idea! Through this challenge, we have received mentorship and support from some of the greatest minds in the COVID-19 space. Since then, we have updated our app mock ups to incorporate these new ideas and have started to develop our app in react native.

What we learned

Our team is always hungry to learn more and incorporate knowledge from various sources to continuously improve our app! So far, we have enhanced our knowledge about front-end design to create a user interface that is both attractive and easy to use. Realizing that we would need a way to sustain our app, our team has been reading up on marketing and business development to create a competitive product that can garner revenue through premium accounts for grocery stores. Lastly, to ensure we meet the needs of everyday people, we have been conducting surveys and user experience interviews, gaining real-world knowledge on what exactly is needed to change customer behaviour.

What's next for COVAL

Up next for COVAL is to wrap up app development and begin marketing our app. Currently, we are in contact with multiple grocery stores in Toronto to secure partnerships which will help with the beta testing of our app. We are also set to release a landing page which will allow interested users to follow along with the progress that we have made for far. And with that, stay tuned for COVAL, coming to an app-store near you.

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